The Trumpcare Debacle That We Knew Would Happen And How Steve Bannon Wants Trump To Keep Enemies List Behind It

(SL) – Trumpcare had no chance of being implemented because simply put, Healthcare isn’t like turning on a light switch. It’s difficult and not something that can be constructed overnight.

New York Magazine reports, The American Health Care Act is a truly horrendous piece of legislation. But it did not become the vehicle for the Obamacare repeal effort because Trump, or Ryan, or anybody insisted on it over some other option. It became the repeal bill because nobody in the Republican Party had a better idea.

Reforming the health-care system is an inherently daunting project. What makes health care so resistant to change is that, the worse the system gets, the harder it is to change. More waste means more profit centers with an interest in protecting their income. And more uninsured people means more anxiety for those who do have insurance about losing it, and hence more resistance to change. The political miracle of Obamacare was its ability to design a way to cover the uninsured and to pay for the coverage in a politically viable fashion. The law found a way to solve a political problem that had frustrated would-be reformers for decades.

And they accomplished it against the ruthless opposition of a united party that has used every demagogic method to undermine it — in Washington, in the states, and in the courts.If Republicans had not launched a legal battle to allow states to deny Medicaid coverage to their citizens, and then cruelly taken up the opportunity to do so; sabotaged small but crucial risk-corridor payments to encourage insurer participation; and denied funds for outreach to exchange customers, it would be functioning better than it is. Still, it is functioning.

Republicans have spent eight years fooling themselves about Obamacare. They have built a news bubble that relentlessly circulates exaggerated or made-up news of the law’s shortcomings and systematically ignores its successes.

The smartest members of the conservative-wonk set played a more clever game to retain their influence. No serious conservative analyst could argue that Obamacare had actually made the health-care system worse.

How could they, when the federal government is now spending less money on health care than it was projected to spend before Obamacare passed, medical inflation is at the lowest level since the government began recording it 50 years ago, and 20 million more Americans have insurance?

But admitting Obamacare constituted an improvement in the health-care system, even an imperfect one, would be tantamount to expulsion from the conservative movement, and with it any hope of influencing Republican policy.

White House Strategist Steve Bannon tried to force Republicans to vote for bill but was shutdown quick. The Business Insider says, a few days before the American Health Care Act, the Republican replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, was pulled from the floor of the House of Representatives, House Republicans had a sharp rebuke for chief White House strategist Steve Bannon when he met with them at the White House, according to a report from Axios.

The conversation started off on the wrong foot, with Bannon adopting a tone the report characterized as authoritative.

“Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill,” Bannon reportedly said to members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus.

But those in the Freedom Caucus weren’t buying into Bannon’s opening gambit. ” You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either,” said one member of the caucus.

The meeting was part of an effort by the Trump administration to woo Freedom Caucus members – without their support, the bill was doomed.

It seems those threats pretty much turned of the party adding to a long list of why it didn’t get approved. Following the failure, allegedly Steve Bannon was urging the president to make an enemies list of all those who didn’t vote for the repeal.

The New York Times reports that Bannon kept on pushing President Donald Trump to pressure the health care vote to move forward so that an “enemies list” could be compiled of all those who voted against the measure. The president’s legislative affairs director, Marc Short, was also pushing the same idea.

Unsurprisingly, Speaker Paul Ryan repeatedly told the president that making enemies out of fellow Republicans in the House was not the smartest idea considering that he would need them for other pieces of legislation in the future. In the end, Trump decided to listen to Ryan and back down.